Not necessarily knocking the translator but ten translators will still produce ten different translations. I’ve differed many times with accepted translations of Latin and Polish.

Sounds like you run into a dilemma everytime you go to buy a translation of a work of any sort. Unless someone reads Latin they will have to have a level of trust in a translator in any Patristic writing thats been translate. All i know is that Sarah is an excellent translator and very gifted, so much so that she can read the ancient manuscripts themselves. Many experts cannot translate without an edited text, but she can translate straIght from the hardest to read manscripts.

Sounds like you run into a dilemma everytime you go to buy a translation of a work of any sort. Unless someone reads Latin they will have to have a level of trust in a translator in any Patristic writing thats been translate. All i know is that Sarah is an excellent translator and very gifted, so much so that she can read the ancient manuscripts themselves. Many experts cannot translate without an edited text, but she can translate straIght from the hardest to read manscripts.

I’m of the opinion that translations always lose something even if the translations are impressive. One can claim, “Hey, I just had Shakespeare translated into Chinese” but really? And does the ordinary man in the Chinese streets read it as Gospel truth as Anglos tend to with things that anything that is translated into English. I think they (in China) realize that if one truly wants to appreciate Shakespeare he’ll just have to learn the English of that period.

That said, I don’t want to discredit your friend. After all it took someone outside the Vatican to first realize that when Pope Benedict announced “declaro…ministerio episopi romae…renuntiare” he was indeed resigning his Papacy. Or was it denouncing? Or renouncing? After the first translation, things tend to get that way. After thousands of years we’re still debating whale vs large fish, chalice vs cup, etc.

I read translations as lots of things get translated into English. But I understand they are just translations, not absolute fact. Even something as simple as conversions from the metric system into the English system or vice versa over time can prove disastrous. (This actually happened with the Mars probe.)